◼ TECHNOLOGY Bloomberg Businessweek March 8, 202122
POLINSKY: PHOTOGRAPH BY CAYCE CLIFFORD FOR BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK. ROES: PHOTOGRAPH BY TRAVIS DOVE FOR BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEKBefore the Covid-19 pandemic shut offices
around the world, tech giants and startups would
compete to hire executives like Polinsky and their
teams by offering perks including free gourmet
food, pingpong tables, and on-site doctors at
gleaming Silicon Valley campuses. Now the battle
for talent is going fully remote, with many compa-
nies granting top candidates permission to avoid
the office altogether. Executive searches in the
industry often don’t even mention the location of
company headquarters, and some explicitly offer
full-time remote work.
One typical listing, sent around by headhunter
Richard Kolodny for an e-commerce company seek-
ing a chief legal officer, reads: “TOP COMPENSATION
PACKAGE. This position can be FULL TIME REMOTE
even after the pandemic ends.”
Silicon Valley has long been at the vanguard of
changes in work habits—from open offices to online
chats. Its shift to remote work, too, may outlast
the coronavirus. According to tech executives and
recruiters, companies that still require leaders to
be at headquarters risk looking sluggish and old-
fashioned, while ones offering remote work have
a bigger, more diverse talent pool to tap. “Not one
of my clients requires an HQ-based executive any-
more,” says Andy Price, founder of tech recruiter
Artisanal Talent Group. “If they do, I won’t take the
project, because that means the company is too
stupid to see the handwriting on the wall. Covid
unleashed the beast, and we’re not going back.”
Artisanal, whose clients include Databricks,
Snowflake, and Splunk, handled about 100 exec-
utive searches in 2020 for more than 50 compa-
nies. None of them required candidates to be at
headquarters. Prior to the pandemic, at least 90%
of Artisanal’s clients wanted new executives to be
at or near their main campus, according to Price,
who called in for the interview from a home office
in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.
Splunk Inc., a provider of data analysis soft-
ware with a market cap of $23 billion, used to
woo talent to its San Francisco headquarters
with such features as game rooms and kombu-
cha on tap. It dropped the word “headquarters”
from its job listings altogether in 2020. The impe-
tus was the pandemic, but the company quickly
recognized the potential benefits of going remote,
including access to workers outside the Valley.
“At this point, we have the majority of our exec-
utive team in dispersed locations, not in the San
Francisco Bay Area,” says Chief Executive Officer
Doug Merritt. “I moved from Northern California
to Austin, Texas, over the summer and plan to be
there indefinitely.”The shift is even happening within software
engineering, the heart of the tech industry, and
traditionally an office-centric profession. Take
Jonathan Roes, an engineering leader who spent
about seven years helping run Salesforce.com Inc.’s
Heroku platform. Last year, he was recruited for
two different jobs. The first was with Google as an
engineering manager at its Sunnyvale, Calif., cam-
pus. Roes, who is 34 and lives in Charlotte with
his wife and 7-year-old daughter, asked if he could
work remotely rather than uproot his family. The
Google hiring manager told him that would be
“extremely difficult” and would require a vice pres-
ident or higher to grant a rare special exception. A
Google spokeswoman declined to comment.
The other job, a VP of engineering role at
startup Streamlit Inc., offered the option to work
from home indefinitely. Even though Streamlit paid
less, Roes took the job. “The requirement to move
was a big part of my decision,” he says. “There are
the laggards and the cutting-edge companies in
tech and in the approach to work.”
Streamlit co-founder Adrien Treuille, a for-
mer Googler himself, used to believe in congre-
gating in an office. “I was a happy Silicon Valley▼ Working remote
allowed Polinsky to join
Shopify without moving“Not one of
my clients
requires an
HQ-based
executive
anymore”